Internet-Savvy Teens Break
Traditional Household Roles

KUALA LUMPUR -- When journalists began dropping by their small row house to talk to their 17-year-old son, Tan Chin Lin and Ng Lay See were mortified.

The visitors wanted to hear about the software he was creating in his bedroom after school. For Mr. and Mrs. Tan, civil servants who had never even used a computer, their son Shawn might as well have been speaking an alien language. After the visitors left, the father would admonish the boy: "You are self-trained. You have no master. How can you talk so much?"